I think Humbug was probably my favourite.

What would you compare it to?

I've enjoyed playing Adam Cadre's stuff, but particularly 9:05. It was short, clever and fun.

That was the one where you had to put the fish in your ear that you prevented from going down the drain with the towel or something. Oh, do I remember that one. The puzzles were the most illogical ever....
I love the HHGTTG series, but I hate that game violently.
Zork wasn't bad, but as with all the games the whole "Guess the parser" annoyed me.

9:05 seconded. Awesome little game, it takes maybe ten minutes to play through and was created as an introduction to the IF form. Very rewarding though even if you've played a lot of text adventure.
My favorite Infocom game is Suspended, which has you frozen in a cryo chamber through the whole game. All action is performed by six robots which each have different limitations. Only one of them can hear, another has to do all the heavy lifting, there's one that speaks in rhyme, etc.
Eons ago I played a MUD called GemStone III. It was so well written and so much fun that when I moved to where I couldn't use the online service it was part of I started trying out everyday free MUDs. None of them held a candle to it. Last year I went on a tour of the newer MUDs and found that not much has changed except the admins are angry and have come up with all sorts of awesome rules.
One exception: Aardwolf, which is absolutely great. Combat is fun, the people are nice, the writing is alright, and best of all there's a long, in-depth tutorial quest chain which you can skip entirely or leave and come back to it as you like.
Has anyone here played Bad Machine?
Douglas Adams wrote Bureaucracy, by the way.

That just made me remember another Infocom game I enjoyed a lot - much like 9:05 it's all about story and doesn't use too many puzzles: A Mind Forever Voyaging
Nope, but I'm trying it now!

I made some very crude text adventures back in the 1990s when we were being trained in Turbo Pascal (:|) at school. I didn't know how to do an inventory properly though.
I could probably do better today (not sure story wise), but I've not touched any programming language for more than a dabble in years.
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Can't remember that many, been too long since I've played them.
I did spend my lunch break today playing (flash version) :- Lost Pig (and place underground)

I tried it, and it was great! Very clever indeed.

There's a text adventire buried in Fallout 3 somewhere isn't there?

Yes, it's pretty simple and more like a Choose Your Own Adventure, since you pick from a list of possible responses, not unlike the game's NPC dialogue. I don't want to spoil it here but there's a page at the Fallout wiki for the location.
I forgot to mention that, from what I've read, Trinity is widely considered the best Infocom game. Every few years I try to play it and die before I have any idea what's happening, but I guess people liked that sort of thing back then.

Inform 7 is incredibly well-suited to IF development, though I will say that I've run into a few snags. The fact that it uses natural language sometimes gets me in trouble. Because it's *still code*, the interpreter still has expectations about how syntax works and such. I can't write the code of the IF with the same expression that I'm used to with prose -- the similarity of the language makes it easy for me to drift from one mindset to the other. That leads to bugs.
Ah well.
Lately I've been playing shorter IF games like Violet. Good for an hour's entertainment, doesn't require much investment in time or mapping or anything.

Realistically speaking that doesn't make it much different from normal text adventures, they just make you type stuff in and match it to the expected responses

Only in the same sense that all computer games are basically just running and jumping. Only true in the extreme and completely untrue for a huge segment of other games.

Hmm, you're standing in a room and the story is on the other side of the door. Is there really any difference between clicking the line of text that says "open door" and having an open text cursor that would let you type in any old bullshit before you type the one and only command it is programmed to respond to, "Open Door"?

Oh-kay. Sounds like you don't like IF games. Maybe you'd prefer reading other threads.
Yes, there's a difference, because it's never just an issue of getting through a door. If you don't "get" the experience, then you could just put on a movie where you don't have to click anything at all.